Hi All,

I will be holding training sessions for software products in England. The training will take place in Exeter which is more of a suburban area.

Any pointers for training English users? I have already asked one of the trainees what training is like in England and he told me that it's more like "nose to the grindstone" than anything else.

I don't want my "engagement" activities or games to seem too trivial or silly.

Please help! Thanks.

Hi Jackie -- Here's a link loaded with generalities, but at least may help give you a baseline from which to work and ask questions...

http://www.cyborlink.com/besite/united_kingdom.htm

Most of the other info I was able to find all led me to classes in learning how to do business in England and other resources that were not free.

Jackie,
If your participants are college-educated, you might want to look into the differences between the UK system and one where you live (US?). I found that it helped me a great deal.

When I do technical courses in the UK I find the participants more knowledgable, more interested in the topics, more capable of thinking through workshops and exercises and generally more "with it", compared to here in the US, at least in general.

I think your engagement activities will work well if they understand the WIIFM, especially that it is not time wasting, but has a valid educational purpose.

Jackie,

Being English myself, I am surprised by the comments of your trainee. We are used to all sorts of training interventions here and would welcome your 'engagement' activities.

As long as there is a true learning point to the intervention I think you'll find that we can be quite open minded. We can be quite pragmatic in our approach and like clear signs of the learning intent. However, I'd be surprised if we were much different in style to those from the US.

You only have to look at the free content on my website (based in the UK) to see that games and activities are integral to our training events. In fact these events are often the more popular kind.

We have a good level of education in the UK (despite the media reports) and I'm sure you will find participants engaged, eager to learn and certainly able to take ideas on board. I think travelerjjm is right in his assumption.

If you'd like any advice or help, please get in touch.